


to where birds were breaking open the dense blue air

by Siria



Series: After the Other [8]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-17
Updated: 2009-04-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Sheppard was quite possibly the stupidest person Rodney had ever fallen in love with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to where birds were breaking open the dense blue air

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Jenn.

John Sheppard was quite possibly the stupidest person Rodney had ever fallen in love with.

He didn't say this lightly, because over the years there had been some uncharacteristic missteps on his part: Róisín Ní Chaoimh on his one, ill-fated trip to the Gaeltacht, fourteen and sweaty-palmed; Jack Byrne, whose sly smiles and vicious right hook had almost prevented Rodney from getting 10 A1s in the Leaving Cert; that one awful mistake which had sent Rodney running from Boston, unable to bear the hurt anywhere except back home.

None of them, of course, had managed to trip over their own untied shoe laces and fall ass-over-tit down the stairs in the Long Library, giving themselves one hell of a black eye and breaking their leg in two places.

More importantly, Rodney had never had to live with any of them while they were recuperating from an accident like that. Both the doctor and the Trinity administration had flatly refused to allow John to go back to work before the end of the summer—not with a break that bad, and not into a building constructed almost 400 years before anyone had ever heard of accessibility. Given the drizzly April weather—a lowering grey sky over a shivering grey city; the Liffey churning its way out to the Irish Sea, rushing under O'Connell Bridge with alarming force—there was little for John to do but sit on the couch and mope.

John moping was a distracting thing, and Rodney couldn't afford to be distracted right now—not with his desk in their study buckling beneath the weight of papers to do with exam setting and assignments being handed in and evaluations and assignments being handed back with WRONG WRONG A THOUSAND TIMES WRONG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR HEAD scrawled all over them in bold red ink. (He liked to give his students room to grow.)

Rodney made him tea, and John decided he wanted coffee.

Rodney made him coffee, and John thought maybe he wanted the couch cushions plumped up instead.

Rodney punched the cushions with a perhaps unwarranted amount of force, and John decided that actually he'd like it if Rodney could switch the channel over to TV3 so John could watch the _Coronation Street_ omnibus.

Still, Rodney thought he was doing a reasonable job of being an angel of mercy—Florence Nightingale in a tattered old t-shirt; the Mother Theresa of Dublin 9—until John huffed and flopped sideways and demanded that _someone_ should make him hot buttered toast. "That," Rodney said, flinging a properly-plumped cushion at John's head, "is _it_! I am supposed to be the unreasonably demanding one in this relationship!"

"What?" John said. "It's not my fault I'm bored!"

"I am not going to dignify that remark with a response," Rodney called over his shoulder, walking back through the sliding doors into the study. "And I am certainly not going to mention any shoelaces which _should have been tied_, you lazy imbecile. You're just lucky your hair cushioned the impact."

There was some mumbling from the direction of the couch, which might have included the term _wanker_, but Rodney was too busy rummaging underneath his desk to pay much attention. Eventually, he found what he was looking for—half a ream of computer paper and some pens—and dropped them in John's lap.

John looked up at him, one eyebrow raised. "And what d'you expect me to do with this?"

"What?" Rodney squinted at him. "Why should _I_ know what you're going to do with it. Write the great Irish novel, express your inner Picasso, write up a shopping list. I don't care! So long as you stop bothering me. And as long as you include Pringles on the shopping list."

John stuck his tongue out at Rodney, but didn't otherwise demur; and Rodney went back to sit at his desk, stuck in his iPod headphones, and tried to use Grieg to drown out the strains of the _Corrie_ theme song.

***

John did not use the paper to write on, or to draw on. Instead, Rodney emerged blinking from the study, hours later, to find that the formerly empty fruit bowl (an unused gift from Jeannie; it was almost cute that she thought they ever knowingly bought fruit) on the coffee table was now full of dozens of origami paper cranes.

Rodney stopped and stared, but John just shrugged his shoulders, and let another little white bird go sailing into the bowl.

"You really are bored, aren't you?" Rodney asked, folding his arms and watching John as he picked up another piece of paper and started to work on it: fingers deft and practised, tousled head bowed and toes twitching.

"Nah," John said blandly, "I'm good," and Rodney rolled his eyes and padded into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. There was little point trying to talk John out of one of these moods, but a steaming mug of tea left by his elbow in silent apology tended to help; as did a carefully casual kiss to his temple when Rodney eased himself down onto the couch next to him and demanded that they watch the _Battlestar Galactica_ rerun on Sky.

***

John was really, really, terrifyingly bored. Rodney knew this because a packet of coloured printing paper vanished from his desk, while the bowl of paper cranes became a flock full of birds of paradise—blue and red and yellow and green and orange, large and small. Rodney got fed up with finding them everywhere—in the kitchen drawers, nesting on top of the spoons; in the bathroom cabinet, sitting on his toothbrush; in his shoes and under the coffee table and in the sugar bowl; scattered through the laundry basket and tucked into the pages of his physics journals.

"No more birds!" Rodney said on Monday morning, struggling to put his jacket on with one hand while stuffing his laptop and a folder into his messenger bag with another. "None! I mean it! They are verboten, forbidden, nein, nyet, nicht, nada, coiscithe."

"Uh huh," said John, who was slumped at the kitchen table, bleary eyed and rumpled in t-shirt and boxer shorts while he inhaled a rasher sandwich.

"Just—stay out of trouble or feats of Olympic-scale origami, okay? I'll be back by four at the latest," Rodney said, and leaned over to press a kiss to John's grease-smeared mouth.

"Gross," Rodney muttered when he pulled back, half to himself, scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Ah, I know you are," John said easily, dumping another spoonful of sugar into his tea, "but sure I love you anyway."

"Ha ha," Rodney said, and ran to catch his bus; and later, rummaging through his bag while the bus pulled slowly onto Dorset Street, he found a small red bird tucked behind his wallet, a little piece of black fluff glued to its head for hair.

Rodney kept it safe in the palm of his hand all the way in to his office; tucked the John-Bird in next to his computer monitor while he worked.

***

He woke up from a nap that evening to find that John had balanced one on his nose; soon enough to hear John's awful, neighbour-irritating _har har har_ of laughter, but not soon enough to prevent photos from being taken.

(One of them later ended up as John's Facebook profile photo: of Rodney with his hair a mess, his mouth wide open, snoring on the couch with the bird perched on his face—wings spread wide like a miniature bird of prey. Rodney, who abhorred Facebook with every fibre of his misanthropic being, was forced—forced!—to create an account of his own just so that he could leave abusive comments on John's wall.)

Rodney sat up and spluttered and began to work his way up to a really good rant—perhaps not so epic as the one which resulted from the time a sleep-deprived John accidentally put washing up liquid in the washing machine, but still really enjoyable—when John drawled _oh, whisht_ and leaned in to kiss him. The kiss was deep and slow, John's stubble rasping against the palm of Rodney's hand, John's fingers twining themselves into the soft cotton of Rodney's t-shirt, the back of his hand grazing Rodney's belly and making it twitch. Closer and closer, Indian-summer hot, and so _good_, but when Rodney pulled back a little, he poked John in the shoulder. "You—you—don't think you're going to distract me from the fact that you're being all, all, hot and nefarious!"

John pouted a little—which Rodney thought was an entirely unsuitable expression on a man pushing 42, thank you very much—and said, "It's just kissing it better, Rodney; I have been _wounded_, remember?"

"Yes!" Rodney said, possibly at a higher pitch than was entirely warranted. "Yes, yes, I am very much aware of that, I got the phone call from Security to say you'd ended up unconscious at the feet of two German tourists called Uli and Arnold and there was an ambulance and I, I—" Rodney does remember it: the feeling of utter panic, the way his heart seemed to stop because god, what if John, if John, running back over the rugby pitch towards the library with each breath painful in his chest, arriving in time to see them loading John into the ambulance and he'd been so _pale_.

"Rodney—don't. Don't." The lines around John's eyes, his mouth, are drawn tight, and his distress makes him look older than he had a few moments ago.

"I just—you could have—and you don't even seem to _realise_, and it's all sitting around cultivating your beard and making birds and really it's just very, very... unacceptable," Rodney finished limply.

"Rodney," John said, and he was holding Rodney's wrist now in one hand, tight enough that he had to be able to feel the skip in Rodney's pulse, "Rodney, I _wouldn't_—"

"Yes, yes," Rodney said irritably, kissing John firmly on the lips before slumping back against John's side and trying not to huff more than was absolutely necessary; he didn't think he had realised himself just how upset he was, how deep the fear. "You love me, I love you, it's all very touching, and now we are going to sit here and watch the news. You are going to pretend I didn't just have that little outburst, and I am going to mock your crush on Anne Doyle."

"Well. Okay," John said. He sounded a little stunned; Rodney had that effect on people a lot, when they were especially impressed by the force of his rightness.

"I'm glad you agree with me," Rodney said stiffly, chin tilting upwards; and they drank tea, and heckled the TV screen whenever a politician appeared on it; and John did nothing more than smile, secretly, when Rodney pressed a new-made blue paper crane into his hand—closed his fingers loosely around it, so that John could keep it safe.


End file.
